If only Daniel Mahoney had taught at an Ivy League university, millions more Americans would be aware of him than is the case in 2025. Still, a growing body of opinion leaders is paying attention to Mahoney’s record of producing one brilliant, insightful, intellectually rigorous book after another.
Indeed, this professor emeritus at Assumption University won the Paolucci Prize for the Conservative Book of the Year, awarded by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2023. (Henry and Anne Paolucci endowed this cash prize and were my undergrad and graduate school mentors at St. John’s University in the 1970s.)
This year’s “The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now” is one of Mahoney’s finest offerings. Once again, he reveals the tremendous breadth of his knowledge, readings, and inquiries into the broadest spectrum of political and philosophical thinking, from the totalitarians to the “progressives” and on to those favoring ordered, constitutional liberty as the best hope for humankind.
Mahoney draws on the wisdom of George Orwell, Alexis de Tocqueville, Albert Camus, and Edmund Burke, but nods to some of his contemporaries, such as the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Rod Dreher as well.
With the expungement of the Nazi state by force in 1945 and the peaceful rout of Soviet-style communism in Europe by 1990 and 1991, many observers concluded that the brutalities, economic failures, and the suppression of freedom of expression and freedom to worship would have consigned such evil philosophies, as President Reagan put it, “to the ash heap of history.” But no, argues Mahoney, all too many in the West remain or even become enthralled with the lie that powerful, ever-sprawling, centrally driven government is compatible with human nature and progress.
DEI and Victimhood
(iQoncept/Shutterstock)
Steeped in the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mahoney notes that today’s “woke” progressives are using watered-down identity-politics scapegoats. They lean on the harsher finger pointing that real totalitarians have relied on to divide multiple societies for over 100 years. Mahoney adds that France’s great Raymond Aron lays much of the blame for transcontinental genocide at the feet of Marx himself—“a cursed sophist who holds his part of responsibility in the horrors of the twentieth century.”
A “woke” DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) operative in a corporation, state government, or university might instruct his colleagues that white and Asian people are the oppressors of blacks and some Hispanic groups, who are anointed with permanent “victim” status. To Stalin and later Mao, the Kims, Castro and other communists, landowners and the Marx-labeled bourgeoisie were oppressors deserving of property expropriation, reeducation, and even imprisonment and death.
An even worse status and fate for Jews remaining in Europe was a core goal of the thankfully vanquished Nazis, but remains an energizing ideological impetus for today’s Islamic extremists. This is exemplified by Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion, with murder, rape and kidnapping of Jewish civilians lauded as a legitimate “resistance,” including the most brutal executions of children.
Mahoney explains how the nationwide spasms of rioting, looting and arson in 2020 constituted an attempt at a “cultural revolution,” milder only in degree than the punishing, Maoist-driven, original cultural revolution in mainland China during the 1960s and 1970s. As the good professor observes, during the turmoil on our streets in 2020, “the most ‘privileged’ Americans playacted at revolution, as if any ideological revolution can ever end well.”
One of the premiere witnesses to the ideological lie was the aforementioned Solzhenitsn, who for 11 years was imprisoned or condemned to internal exile by the Soviet state. One of the towering intellectual figures of the 20th century, Solzhenitsn determined that the two pillars of the totalitarian state are lies and violence. In his classic work, “The Gulag Archipelago,” he observed that the great ideological lie “gives evildoing its long-sought justification.”
Mainstreaming Lies
Professor Mahoney points to today’s “progressives” as relying on the “same mix of moral nihilism and rage” as their putative role models. The whole industry devoted to DEI and the burgeoning acceptance of socialism in polite company are testaments to this in contemporary America. Recent (namely Sen. Bernie Sanders) and potential (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) Democratic candidates for president volunteer their advocacy for “democratic” socialism, as does one of the leading candidates for mayor of New York City this year.
In recent coverage of this year’s “May Day” protests on an all-news local cable television channel in New York, viewers saw videos of large banners proclaiming a “Revolutionary Communist” party, festooned with unmistakable hammers and sickles! The reporter drew no attention to such extremists parading in what was described as a “pro-labor” march.
Certainly, the election of President Donald Trump and common-sense majorities in Congress have seemed to slow down and sometimes halt (temporarily?) the march of the “woke” and the relentless drive of those embracing ideological lies to seize power once again. But how can we thwart such authoritarian drives to suppress our freedoms, distort our Constitution’s intent, discard America’s most cherished traditions and delegitimize Western religions over the long term?
Mahoney draws upon German-born, Austrian-schooled political philosopher Erich Voegelin, an ardent foe of Nazism and communism, who argued for a renewal of “civic education as [a] humanizing [enterprise] fully committed to the pursuit of wisdom about the best way for human beings to live.”
Among other media and a few corners of academia, The Epoch Times continues to be an effective contributor to that “civic education,” especially in exposing those ever-dangerous ideological lies that continue to threaten human freedom.
‘The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now‘
By Daniel J. Mahoney
Encounter Books, April 15, 2025
Hardcover: 168 pages
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